Sunday, January 14, 2007

Findory rides into the sunset

Findory.com launched on January 2, 2004. The website just passed its three year anniversary and, including the early work on the ideas behind Findory, Findory has been in my life for nearly four years.

In the last few months, I have been evaluating new directions for Findory. I asked colleagues I trust for their thoughts and pulled in two senior advisors (thanks, Bill and Dan).

Some good options came out of these discussions, but none lead down a path I am passionate about. I built Findory to follow a passion.

I built Findory around the idea of applying Amazon.com-style personalization and recommendations to information. Search only helps if you can say what you want. Personalization helps you discover things that you could not have found on your own.

My passion is helping people discover information they would otherwise miss. My passion is working on ways to help people with the overwhelming flood of information in their daily lives.

Here, Findory has been successful. Findory has influenced work at Google, Microsoft, AOL, and elsewhere. I am pleased with what Findory has accomplished. At some point, I have to declare victory and move on. I am moving on now, not to a new venture, but to spend more time on health and with family.

Development on Findory now will slow to a crawl. There may be new features, but they will be rare. I no longer will spend time exploring funding, biz dev deals, or recruiting.

Findory appears to have sufficient resources to run on autopilot through most of 2007. Findory will eventually fade away, but I believe it has touched immortality through the impact it had.

It was exciting, challenging, and fun to try to build a startup. I consider myself very lucky to have had that opportunity.

53 comments:

Congratulations on having the passion and wherewithal to purse your vision for Findory for the last four years. Few people can say they've done the same. Thanks also for sharing your experiences with an anonymous, largely silent audience. And finally, congratulations to your family on getting you back!

Wow, I am so sorry to see Findory go. It has easily been one of my favorite online tools since the day I discovered it, and I have no idea how I am going to live without it.

Thank you so much, Greg, for all the hard work you have put into Findory. You may consider yourself lucky to have worked on Findory, but I consider myself lucky to have used it. Findoy has taught me what we need to demand of personalized systems, and any company that enters this space will have no choice but to follow the rules you established, or fail by not learning.

I hope you consider ways for Findory to live on, maybe by giving back part of the codebase to the community, or letting the users fund the website's basic upkeep. If you can't, let me be one of many to say that I consider it a priviledge to have gained from Findory in many ways.

I am truly sorry to see Findory slide into the sunset. I have been using it for 18 months or more and find its technology news to be a very useful source. I will continue to use it as long as it continues to be functional for me. Then, sadly, I will move on to something else.

While I am very sad that Findory will be sunsetted, I have no fear that the next thing Greg touches will make us look fondly upon Findory as "v1", the site that set us up for what comes next out of Greg's head. I very much look forward to seeing Greg's next big thing... Best, Michael

Greg, Awesome job! Findory was a great invention, perhaps ahead of its time. I have been there several times myself. Better to be on the bleeding edge, making it happen, and having the time of your life.

You have a bright future ahead of you. Lots of doors will open for you.

Greg you're a sharp researcher and obviously can build great, scalable code and ship solid product. I can't help thinking that if you were in the bay area the startup support network for Findory would have been a little deeper. I hope that after recharging your batteries with family we'll see you back doing another new & interesting project. I also hope that you'll continue to blog your thoughts about the evolving architecture space, your writing there has always been spot-on.

Congrats on all the hard work you've done, Greg, and I hope that in your mind it has paid off in some way, even if you may not have had the exit that you wanted. It sounds like "health and family" are big issues for you at the moment so I trust your priorities are in order.

Who knows, put Findory up on eBay and you might get a decent price! :)

It would be great if you open sourced the Findory codebase so the rest of us could suggest improvements or at least learn from it. While there exist academic papers, there are almost no real world personalization examples for young computer scientists (like myself) to learn from.

Who knows, stepping away from Findory may be the best thing you can do. Some distance could help you see future possibilities that may be clouded now because of the daily grind. The insights you've gained (and generously shared) over the past four years will be invaluable in your future endevors. While there's nothing wrong with returning to the mega corp world at some point, I hope this won't be the last Linden startup. AG

Oh c'mon man, don't make me have to start reading blogs and news all on my own! ;)Daily Findory email with personalized info has been working great for me, although it took me a few days to untrain Findory and explain it that I am not *really* interested in Britney Spears and friends.

Why only 2007? Why can't it last indefinitely? I don't know enough about how much it costs you to run... but if a scorpion can live by eating one fly every 18 months, surely a web site can live for ever on very little?

Yes, you have been a major lamppost along the way of Personalization, and being one of the developers responsible for p13n at AOL, we will miss your comments and wisdom on the subject.What we have found is that WE may be interested and facinated by the ability to give User's recomendations, but they are not so interested in the subject.

It will have its place in the future, but it will take more inventor, innovators like yourself to make it happen.

And as for priorities, you positively have made the right choice! Best of Luck

You surely set a direction with Findory. Your blog and findory are in my favorites list! Now that I am not going to see one of them, I really hope I would not lose the other. I love your Blog. Very analytical and logical.

I built something similar the last 2 years. Many people told me to monetise my software. But the software is currently only useable by me, so i recommended findory to a friend three hours ago. Only to find you are stopping development right now.

I want to add my contribution to the chorus. I've used Findory almost from its beginning. I've found nothing like it for an intelligent and responsive news service - and I use some of the other services too.

Greg, I understand your need to stay with your passion but, with so much crap around, why does something this good have to go?

"Man's Search For Meaning" should be the top priority in everyone's life. Certainly, health and family are basics for "meaning". We all need (and are called) to come back to basics at different points in our lives.

We never met officially, but I saw you at SES once. My wife's successful battle with breast cancer these last 9 months have brought me back to basics. It is a good thing to have peace along with your passions. Peace be with you.

I'm a student at Stanford and heard your talk last quarter in our Data Mining class. You came across as really passionate about your work and I'm sure you'll carry that over to whatever your next venture might be.

How ironic Greg. So synonymus is recommendation with you/Findory that recently to do a college project I searched google with the following phrase:recommendation site:glinden.blogspot.com

And now, we hear that Findory is closing? Duh!

Frankly I never did use Findory myself, because it wasn't too intutive and didn't have that "zing"; there was hardly that "useful" result to quantitatively see results on the very first visit. May be that is what user's wanted. See results on the very first visit - this I think is impossible with information/news results. Most users don't have the time/patience to wait for our recommendation algorithms to work in their background while they read/search for news/information.

Maybe just maybe if Findory was marketed as "Personal News" rather than a recommendation engine - which many people find awkward it would have clicked.

I sincerely wish you all the very best in whatever you do next. Have a nice time. You are such a nice soul and it comes across even in your blog.